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Jewish Contributions to Interfaith Dialogue and Peaceful Co-Existence Jonathan Magonet (Tokyo 31.5.2015)

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Jewish Contributions to Interfaith Dialogue and Peaceful Co-Existence Jonathan Magonet (Tokyo 31.5.2015) Jewish contributions to interfaith dialogue and peaceful co-existence Jonathan Magonet (Tokyo 31.5.2015) On Jews and Judaism When speaking about Judaism and the Jewish people in Japan I am faced with a particular dilemma. According to the only statistics that I could find, the total Jewish population in Japan amounts to about two thousand people (0.0016% of the population). I presume this figure is based on the two small Jewish communities to be found here, in Tokyo and Kobe. Even if this figure is an underestimate, it does mean that most Japanese people are never likely in their lives to meet a Jewish person. In Europe or America there is a small but significant Jewish presence and a long and complex history, so that some aspects of Jewish beliefs and culture are well known. The situation here is very different. This means that when addressing a Japanese audience I am always faced with the question of how much background information I need to give when speaking on any particular topic relating to Jews and Judaism. This is particularly the case when it comes to the question of interfaith dialogue between the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even the relative size of the three raises interesting questions. Though these figures are only approximate, there are about 2.2 billion adherents to Christianity worldwide, just over 30 percent of the world population; Islam has about 1.6 billion adherents, just under 25 percent of the world population; in sharp contrast the total number of Jewish people in the world amounts to about 14 million, 0.2 percent of the world population. So if size alone is to be taken into consideration Judaism hardly belongs in the same league as the other two major religions. And yet, all three belong together as the three so-called ‘monotheistic faiths’, and are also identified together as the ‘Abrahamic’ religions. Before addressing the topic of interfaith dialogue itself I would like to explain more about the nature of Jewish society today. The origins of the Jewish people are to be found in the pages of the Hebrew Bible, a library of books that record the selected memories of a particular people and the civilisation they created between two and three thousand years ago. It reflects their struggles over the period of a millennium in trying to comprehend, and find a way of living with, their revolutionary understanding of the nature and demands of God. This God was understood to be the single Creator of, and power within, the universe, was invisible and in no way to be represented by physical symbols. Yet this God had entered into a special relationship with their ancestor Abraham and ultimately with his descendants, the people known as Israel, a name which means either one who struggles with God or one who struggles for, on behalf of, God. The basis of that relationship according to one important Biblical formulation was that Abraham would educate his offspring to champion the values of ‘righteousness and justice’ in the world (Gen 18:19). This would be exemplified by the society they would build in a land promised to them by God. Moreover, through them all the families of the world would find ‘blessing’, a Biblical term embracing fruitfulness, material prosperity and security. God’s promise was borne out by the rescue of Abraham’s descendants from slavery in Egypt, thus enshrining the concept of freedom from slavery within the Biblical religious system. The relationship with God was formalised in a covenant of mutual responsibility between God and the people of Israel, at Mount Sinai. It was sealed and confirmed by the entry into and settlement in the land of Canaan. 1 The subsequent Biblical materials describe the ups and downs of that experiment in creating a new society, the challenges it faced through internal human successes, failures and follies, and the difficult interaction with both local neighbouring nations and the contemporary super-powers, Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon, and their successors, to the north. Key elements in this story include the creation of a successful state and briefly a minor empire of their own, the subsequent division into two separate kingdoms, both of which became subject to conquest and the deportation of their leadership and large parts of their population. Only the southern kingdom, Judah, from which will come the name ‘Jew’, with its capital in Jerusalem, was restored after a period of exile in Babylon. The second exile, under the Romans some five hundred years later, continued the process of creating what we now know as the Jewish Diaspora, communities of Jews scattered throughout the known world. The people had lost all the previous landmarks of their national religious identity: the Temple in Jerusalem, its priesthood, the land itself and a a royal family. The Judaism that emerged, created by a scholarly elite of rabbis, became a faith community, struggling to maintain its unique identity in widely differing circumstances. Jews lived subsequently under both Christianity and Islam, both of which religions, in different ways, saw themselves as inheritors and successors of Judaism. So Jews had to find ways of responding to the very different spiritual challenges raised by this experience of exile and dependency, whether living as isolated and often oppressed minority communities, or in some kind of intellectual and spiritual symbiotic relationship with the majority society and culture whenever this was possible. The basic Jewish legal principle, ‘dina d’malkhuta dina’, ‘the law of the land is the law’, enabled Jewish communities to conform and indeed contribute to the surrounding societies, as long as the law of the host society did not undermine some ultimate Jewish values. Among the consequences of this history were the removal of any missionary activity from Judaism and a marked caution about welcoming newcomers. But as a corollary Judaism taught that there was no need to become Jewish in order to find God, but that any individual or society would be acceptable to God if they kept seven basic social laws, the ‘laws of the sons of Noah’, mostly derived from the Ten Commandments. Alongside six prohibitions, including murder, idolatry and adultery, there was a seventh positive demand, to ensure that the society created the necessary institutions for promoting justice and the rule of law – the legacy of God’s initial choice of Abraham. This successful model of Jewish existence was to change radically following the European Enlightenment and Emancipation. Jews found themselves for the first time as independent citizens of their respective emerging national states. Their previous collective existence was as a closed self-contained community. This situation was enforced externally by the society in which they lived, and supported internally by a shared commitment to Jewish law, controlled by rabbinic authorities and lay leaders. This closed world came to an end and was gradually replaced by that of individual Jewish citizens of the nation state whose personal relationship with Judaism and the Jewish community became a matter of personal choice. A number of movements and trends emerged that still offered the possibility of belonging formally to the Jewish people but through the personal decision of the individual to belong. The religious groupings, based on their interpretation of Jewish tradition and their relationship to it, ranged from Liberal or Reform through Conservative to a variety of degrees of Orthodox Judaism. But other Jews, aware of the precarious nature of Jewish life in the Diaspora, and influenced by contemporary nationalistic 2 aspirations in the nineteenth century, looked to ending the two thousand years’ experience of exile by returning to their Biblical homeland. Zionism, in its many different forms, religious and secular, socialist and practical, aimed at a permanent solution to the vulnerability of Jewish existence. The movement was ultimately successful in the creation of the State of Israel, but only because of the world’s horror at the Nazi attempt to wipe out all traces of the Jewish people. Yet these trends, religious or ideological, only account for part of the Jewish response to Emancipation and modern society. It can be argued that the major Jewish post-emancipation movement was assimilation to the host society whenever and to the extent that this was possible. This desire to ‘normalise’ the Jewish situation, though experienced as a private matter and as a personal break with the past, was shared by many, but was nevertheless influenced by traditional Jewish religious elements. For example, Jews as individuals identified themselves, often in large numbers, with certain emerging intellectual and ideological trends in Europe, sometimes playing a leading role. While they understood this activity as a conscious rebellion against what they saw as the backwardness and constraints of the Judaism of their parents’ generation, certain aspects of this trend can be seen as ‘secular’ versions of the earlier religious value system. Thus the demand for social justice to be found in Biblical teachings of the prophets and in rabbinic law found their expression in socialist and communist movements, particularly in the history leading up to the Russian revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union.1 The Jewish commitment to study of traditional texts as a central religious value of rabbinic Judaism became translated into intellectual attainments in the arts, sciences, academia and the professions. In the Middle Ages Christian societies had forced Jews to be engaged in areas of commerce and international trade. They were helped in this activity by their network of family and other connections in different countries and the fact that those they worked with shared the same Jewish legal system to regulate their activities.
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